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Posts from the ‘Jazz’ Category

Jun 4

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The bells, the bells…

A peal of church bells is a familiar sound to most, yet full of strangeness. Listening to the baffling patterns created when a simple descending figure breaks up and reforms into a kind of Escher-like musical geometry, you might find yourself wondering if herein lies the true origin of the systems music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

The 30-year-old Sheffield-born pianist and composer Andrew Woodhead takes that sound not just as the inspiration but as the practical basis for Pendulums, a new album-length work subtitled “Music for bell-ringers, improvisers and electronics”. The result is a quite stunning achievement in which jazz yet again proves its unique ability to create a constructive interaction with all sorts of outside forms of music.

The bells of St Paul’s, Birmingham — installed 15 years ago in the 18th century church, not far from where Woodhead studied at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire — are the first things we hear in Pendulums, and the last. Eight bellringers are joined by two trumpets, two alto saxophones, two baritone saxophones and Woodhead’s electronic manipulation of the church bells and of various field recordings, including bicycle bells and the chimes of an ice-cream van. This film of a 10-minute section called “Changes” gives a view of the way in which the composer integrates his three basic building blocks, creating something more than just a sound-bed for the improvising soloists. Sometimes he transfers the characteristics of bell-ringing to the wind instruments, as at the beginning of “Tolls/Waves”, where the horns sound unison notes that evolve into a phasing pattern.

I particularly love the way Woodhead uses the four reed instruments to soften the metallic timbre of the church bells and the trumpets, and how he brings out the bells’ overtones to create a universe of sound. There’s quite a lot of free jazz practice here (a reminder that one of Albert Ayler’s most famous works was called “Bells”), notably in the sparring over a simple ostinato transferred from bells to saxophones on “Partials II”, but there’s also an saxophone-chorale introduction to a piece called “Plain Hunt IV” that recalls the Anglican hymnal (and the enigma of Thelonious Monk’s “Abide with Me”).

“Plain Hunt II” begins by processing the ice-cream van chimes into the sound of a spectral church organ before the horns take over with a passage of overlapping long tones, another example of how imaginatively Woodhead is transferring techniques from one set of musical tools to another. Towards the end of this piece the gentle hissing and sizzling of electronics is underscored by the tolling of a single bell: placed at the very heart of this compelling 68-minute suite, it’s a moment of beautiful simplicity.

* Andrew Woodhead’s Pendulums is released on June 11 on the composer’s own Leker label (www.andrewwoodheadmusic.com). Concert performances of the work are scheduled for 14 October 2021 at St Paul’s, Birmingham and 16 October 2021 at St Clement Danes Church, London WC2. The photograph of Woodhead conducting the recording is by Guri Bosh.

May 17

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Many accents, one voice

Just about the first thing I discovered when I began a three-year term as artistic director of Berlin’s historic jazz festival in 2015 was that I would be required to explain myself. More specifically, I would be asked to describe my “concept”. This was a little disconcerting since I didn’t really have one, at least not in any worked-out form.

What I came up with, thinking on my feet, was a definition applicable to the kind of festival I wanted to make. “Jazz,” I told my inquisitors, “is any music that couldn’t exist if jazz hadn’t existed.”

I’ve never been quite sure whether I invented that aphorism simply out of expediency, in order to cover myself and to explain some of the music I wanted to present, in which the elements of traditional forms of jazz were sometimes attentuated or modified almost to invisibility. Eventually I decided that I believed it enough to feel comfortable about using it whenever it was necessary to justify something.

In my first year, the best example was provided by Divan of the Continents, a 22-piece band jointly led by Cymin Samawatie, a singer born in Berlin to Iranian parents, and Ketan Bhatti, a drummer born in India. Both graduates of jazz courses at Berlin’s University of the Arts (the UdK), together they had devised an ambitious project to bring together a large ensemble of locally based musicians from various ethnic backgrounds, from the principal viola-player of the Berlin Philharmonic and an English free-jazz trombonist to virtuosos of the sheng, the oud, the ney, the kanun and the koto. The aim was to work at creating music which honoured the essence of each player’s respective genre while (and this is the important bit) aiming for something genuinely new. What it would not be was an example of musical tourism. It wouldn’t be obviously “jazz”, either. But you could even see this as being a modern version of jazz’s origin story, in which elements of African and European musics came together to form a hybrid that took on a life of its own.

Since the music was complex, it seemed right to arrange for them to have three days of rehearsals in the small concert hall at the UdK’s Jazz Institute, open to students and the public. Then, on the festival’s closing night, they gave a performance in the 1,000-seater hall of the Berliner Festspiele, leading off a bill completed by Louis Moholo-Moholo’s Four Blokes and Ambrose Akinmusire’s quartet with the singer Theo Bleckmann. It was, I think, a success: the audience gave every appearance of being intrigued, particularly by the settings of poetry sung by Samawatie and two other female singers.

Now Samawatie and Bhatti have made an album of that music, and other pieces, with an ensemble of similar size and instrumentation, containing about half the original personnel. In the meantime, the project been retitled: the album is called Trickster Orchestra. But the concept is the same, and the time spent in preparation has resulted in something rather extraordinary: a music in which the sheng of Wu Wei and the viola of Martin Stegner have equal weight, in which the double bass of Ralf Schwarz can emerge with a walking 4/4 line and the various items of tuned percussion can set up rhythm patterns reminiscent of Steve Reich. The words of the songs range from Psalm 130 to the Sufi poet Rumi and the contemporary poet Efe Duvan, and are sung in Farsi, Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish. The lyricism is always poised and sometimes swooning, but the serenity can be punctured by a fusillade of drums, subtly coloured by electronics.

It’s not a mosaic, but it is a kaleidoscope. Each musician retains her or his own tuning and vocabulary. The various tones, textures and idiomatic accents are overlapped, juxtaposed and filtered through each other, creating something much more interesting than a flavourless fusion. I think it would have interested the founder of Berlin’s jazz festival, the late Joachim-Ernst Berendt, a man with a strong belief in the potential value of opening jazz up to new relationships with the music of other cultures. Trickster Orchestra is an impressive example of where that kind of thinking has led, giving musicians of high skill and inquiring minds the chance to find new paths.

* Trickster Orchestra by Cymin Samawatie and Ketan Bhatti is out now on the ECM label. The photograph of Bassem Alhouri (kanun), Naoko Kikuchi (koto) and Ralf Schwarz (bass) is from their 2015 concert in Berlin and was taken by Camille Blake.

May 10

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Wes Montgomery and friends

By the time Wes Montgomery died of a heart attack in 1968, aged 45, he was most famous for a series of albums, supervised by the producer Creed Taylor, in which he used his jazz chops to turn pop hits — “Goin’ Out of My Head”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “California Dreaming”, “A Day in the Life” — into a form of high-quality, lightly funky easy-listening music. In his earlier years, however, he had raised the bar for jazz guitar — and that Wes Montgomery was the one who visited Europe three years before his death. His touring itinerary included a season at Ronnie Scott’s, where he met some of the musicians who would accompany him to Germany for a TV broadcast commissioned by Norddeutsche Rundfunk, the Hamburg-based station that was, and is, part of the ARD national public broadcasting network.

Playing in NDR’s studios in front of an audience, Montgomery led an eight -piece line-up including one fellow American, the tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin. The six European musicians were the Austrian altoist Hans Koller, the French-Algerian pianist Martial Solal, the French bassist Michel Gaudry, and three Brits: Ronnie Scott on tenor, Ronnie Ross on baritone and Ronnie Stephenson on drums.

The music they played on April 30, 1965 in NDR’s Jazz Workshop series has just been released for the first time, and it’s a fine example of multinational mainstream-modern jazz. The four-piece reed section breezes through the solid, tightly-voiced arrangements of Montgomery’s “West Coast Blues”, “Four on Six” and “Twisted Blues”, Ross’s “Last of the Wine” and “Blue Grass”, Griffin’s “The Leopard Walks” and Solal’s fascinating “Opening 2”. There are special features for Wes on a quartet bossa nova version of “Here’s that Rainy Day”, and an electrifying Griffin on “Blue Monk”. It’s a very satisfying hour, and a welcome discovery.

But there’s also a second disc, a Blu-Ray video recording of the rehearsal in the studio two days earlier, in which the musicians are getting comfortable with the charts while the TV director works out his camera shots. And it contains five minutes that are absolutely remarkable.

Between the rehearsals of “Blue Grass” and “Blue Monk”, Solal runs through an intricate trio arrangement of “On Green Dolphin Street” with Gaudry and Stephenson. As they begin, the other musicians slowly gather round, listening intently. Scott peers over Stephenson’s shoulder, following the chart on the drummer’s music stand. Montgomery stays his chair, cradling his fat-bodied Gibson guitar, but is paying serious attention. So is Griffin, who prowls round to stand behind the pianist.

It’s a breathtaking performance. Typically of Solal, it mixes angular modernity with perfectly integrated hints of the history of jazz piano, from stride to bebop. It’s audacious and witty and wonderful, and the bassist and drummer do brilliantly to keep pace. By the time it’s over, you’re thinking that Solal is the inheritor to Art Tatum’s breathtaking virtuosity. And the other musicians are thinking something similar. You can see it in their body language. And you can hear it when, as the last note dies, Griffin walks round beside Solal, leans into him and says: “Ridiculous!” And as he walks away and he and Scott cross paths, you can see them shaking their heads in admiration. It’s a beautiful thing to see musicians reacting spontaneously in an informal setting. More than half a century later, we can share their sense of delight and discovery.

All these men — in their stylish polo shirts and cardigans and narrow slacks and neat haircuts, with their mastery of a complex musical language — are now gone, except one. That one is Martial Solal, who played with Sidney Bechet and Django Reinhardt and wrote the music for Godard’s À bout de souffle, now 93 years old and, as he has continued to prove through the years, an authentic genius of jazz.

* Wes Montgomery’s The NDR Hamburg Studio Recordings, produced by Stefan Gerdes, Axel Dürr and Joachim Becker, is on the Jazzline Classics/NDR Kultur label.

Apr 26

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Blues for Bob Porter

The name of Bob Porter started appearing on jazz albums at the end of the 1960s and then, with gathering frequency, through the succeeding decades. It soon became obvious that, whether as a record producer, a compiler of historical anthologies or a writer of liner notes, Porter — who died last week at the age of 80 — was most interested in the kinds of jazz that stayed close to old verities: a powerful swing, the feeling of the blues, a warmth of expression, a direct engagement with the audience’s emotions.

Porter did a lot of his work for Bob Weinstock’s Prestige label, but when the Savoy label was bought by Arista he supervised a reissue programme that included a series of double albums called The Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll, two of which you can see two of them above. What Porter located was a sweet spot where jazz and R&B fed each other in hits like Paul Willliams’ “The Hucklebuck” and Big Maybelle’s “Candy”. He supervised anthologies of Miles Davis for Prestige and John Coltrane for Atlantic (for whom he also put together the seven volumes of Atlantic Rhythm and Blues 1947-1974), won a Grammy for a 1979 anthology of Charlie Parker’s Savoy sessions, and produced new albums by Jimmy McGriff, Gene Ammons, Red Rodney, Hank Crawford, Charles Earland and many others. For the last 20 years he was a regular on WBGO, the public-service radio station broadcasting from Newark, New Jersey

His particular take on jazz was summed up in his only book: Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community 1945-75, the story of musicians who earned their living mostly in dance halls and clubs of black America and whose recordings were primarily aimed at the listeners they found there. The book starts with the last of the commercially viable popular-oriented black big bands, such as those led by Buddy Johnson and Erskine Hawkins, and advances chronologically via Louis Jordan, Lionel Hampton, Arnett Cobb, Jack McDuff and Lou Donaldson all the way through to Grant Green and Grover Washington Jr. Producers like Teddy Reig and Bob Shad take their place in the narrative, along with record-company bosses as different as Roulette’s Morris Levy, Savoy’s Herman Lubinsky and Verve’s Norman Granz, and radio disc jockeys from Alan Freed (a jazz fan before he helped invent rock and roll) to Frankie Crocker, a hero of disco whose closing theme — at the end of shows full of Kool & the Gang, the Commodores and Earth, Wind & Fire — was King Pleasure’s “Moody’s Mood for Love”.

Porter only wrote his book, he said, because no one else had, and it was a story that needed to be told. If Soul Jazz were a night out, it would be an organ-tenor-guitar-drums quartet playing to an audience of working people in a lounge on the South Side of Chicago: the kind of meat-and-potatoes jazz you could find on the albums Porter supervised. Swing, blues, warmth, engagement, informality, a complete lack of pretension: the recipe for a kind of basic nourishment that might be harder to find today.

* Bob Porter’s Soul Jazz was published in 2016 by Xlibris.

Apr 14

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A Mike Taylor discovery

When the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Taylor walked into the sea and died in 1969, aged 30, he left behind two albums — Pendulum, by his quartet, and the self-explanatory Trio, recorded in 1966 and ’67 respectively — as a memorial to a talent silenced by the kind of problems experienced by too many creative souls in that era.

Taylor’s gifts and instincts put him somewhere in the line of pianists running from Thelonious Monk through Herbie Nichols and Elmo Hope to the young Cecil Taylor. His playing had a similar sense of a private language being put on public display. There could be a hint of obsession in the way he jabbed at his phrases, testing their resistance before turning them to catch the light from a different angle, but there was nothing forbidding about his music.

His story, from bright promise to unexplained death, was told in a feature in Jazzwise magazine by Duncan Heining in 2007 and at greater length in a useful biography by the Italian writer Luca Ferrari, published six years ago. Taylor remains much mourned both by first-hand witnesses to his short career and by those who know him only from those two albums, produced by Denis Preston for EMI’s Columbia label and now collectors’ items.

A third Mike Taylor album, then, is quite a significant discovery. Mandala consists of a live session by Taylor’s regular quartet — with Dave Tomlin on soprano saxophone, Tony Reeves on double bass and Jon Hiseman on drums — at the Studio Club, Westcliff-on-Sea in January 1965. It was Hiseman who recorded the gig on a reel-to-reel machine and filed the tape away in his archive. On August 29 that year the same group would support the Ornette Coleman Trio in an historic concert at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon; the following May they would assemble at the Lansdowne Studios in Holland Park to record Pendulum.

Mandala contains one jazz standard and four of Taylor’s compositions, making 38 minutes of high-octane music in which the musicians display an obvious reverence for the John Coltrane Quartet of the early ’60s while conveying the impression that, given time and scope, they will find a way to move beyond the template towards the expression of their own character. It can be heard emerging in the hectic exuberance of “Night in Tunisia” — more linear and less dense than the version of the Gillespie favourite captured on Pendulum — and Taylor’s “Folk Dance #1” (a 6/8 tune with unexpected modulations), and in the interesting rhythm section figurations behind Tomlin on “Half Blue”.

Tomlin is the main soloist, confidently feeling his way towards a Trane-like level of incantation while keeping a few more emotional buttons done up. Reeves is slightly under-recorded, as was often the case on amateur recordings from the period, but he can be heard to work well with Hiseman, who is a rewardingly active presence throughout, providing an incessant but constantly stimulating commentary reminiscent to me of Charli Persip. Together they create a powerful momentum.

If there is a regret, it is that Taylor chose to take only two relatively short solos on this occasion, on “Son of Red Blues”, the agile opener, and “Night in Tunisia”. Both are typically intriguing, if somewhat subdued. There might have been a third solo: the title track, which closes the album (and was left untitled until the album’s compilers borrowed one from a painting by the pianist), fades to silence just as Tomlin closes his long, intense solo and Reeves appears to be bridging into what might have been a piano improvisation. Maybe the tape ran out. But Taylor’s accompaniments are so consistently interesting that this is a minor reservation: the point here is the music of a fine group, captured in full and free flight.

* Mandala is available as a download and a limited edition CD from the Jazz in Britain label: http://www.jazzinbritain.org. A vinyl release is forthcoming. Luca Ferrari’s Out of Nowhere: The Uniquely Elusive Jazz of Mike Taylor is published by Gonzo Multimedia.

Apr 11

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The uneasy trio

It’s possible that, like me, you think there are already quite enough jazz piano trio albums in your collection. Think again. Uneasy, the new recording by Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey, demands attention.

The realignment of the piano-bass-drums hierarchy from “piano with rhythm accompaniment” to a full three-way conversation of equals has been going on for decades, and Uneasy is about as elevated as the format currently gets. Listen to the opener, “Children of Flint”, to appreciate the level of interaction between three musicians with virtuoso-level skills and giant imaginations. It sounds lyrical, even simple. But just concentrate on the astonishing touch displayed by each of the trio, whether on piano keys, bass strings, drums or cymbals, and the sense of three seamlessly interlocking and interdependent components.

As you work your way through the 10 tracks — eight compositions by Iyer, plus Geri Allen’s “Drummer’s Song” and Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” — you’ll also notice a complete absence of ego-projection. No one is showing off. On the sole standard, it’s easiest to hear how far Iyer can take the line of piano-playing founded by Bud Powell. Oh displays the deep sense of swing, nimble melodic imagination and beautiful sound of a 21st-century Paul Chambers. Sorey creates a momentum at once light but deep, exploiting a combination of technique and intellect that redefines the investigation of rhythm.

Recorded in a studio in Mount Vernon, NY three months before pandemic arrived, the album comes with a cover photograph of the Statue of Liberty seen through mist and against clouds. In his sleeve note, Iyer writes that Uneasy was originally the title of a collaborative piece with the choreographer Karole Armitage in 2011, exploring “the instabilities that we then sensed beneath the surface of things… the emerging anxiety within American life. A decade later, as systems teeter and crumble, the word feels like a brutal understatement.”

That heightened disquiet, however, remains implied. You’re not thinking about the end of the world. You’re remembering how even the darkest of times can’t extinguish such astonishing creativity. One of the records of the year, no doubt.

* Uneasy is on ECM Records. The photographs of (from top) Iyer, Oh and Sorey are from the CD’s booklet and were taken by Craig Marsden.

Apr 7

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The sound of two

Daniel Cano is a Spanish trumpeter who was born in Huelva in 1983 and has lived in London since 2014. Doug Sides is an American drummer who was born in Los Angeles in 1942, moved to Europe in 1989 and now lives, improbably enough, in Ramsgate, a fishing and ferry port on the eastern tip of Kent. This week they released a four-track digital EP called Duplexity.

It slots into the modern tradition of trumpet-and-drums duets stretching back to Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell, taking in Bobby Bradford and John Stevens and going all the way to Eyebrow, the contemporary Bristol-based pair of Pete Judge and Paul Wigens. If it reminds me of anything, it’s of the best parts of the duo concert by Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie at the Maison de la Culture de Seine Saint-Denis, released as Max + Dizzy: Paris 1989 by A&M. That’s an album which came a little too late in the careers of two great men, making you wish they’d done it 30 or 40 years earlier, when the fires were burning brightest. Duplexity, by contrast, seems to have been made at exactly the right time.

Cano, whose involvements as a leader and a sideman include membership of the London Improvisers Orchestra, studied at the conservatoire in San Sebastián. His groups — including an Ornette Coleman tribute band — have won festival prizes. Sides studied at the University of South California, New York University and Berklee College in Boston, where he was taught by the great Alan Dawson, a mentor of Tony Williams. Over a long career which featured an early stint as the house drummer at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, he has played with Illinois Jacquet, John Handy, Teddy Edwards, Phineas Newborn, Bobby Hutcherson, Abbey Lincoln and many others.

Recorded last October at Big Jelly Studios in Ramsgate, Duplexity is a fine showcase for the evidently strong relationship between a trumpeter whose warm, bright open tone evokes the hard-bop masters of the ’50s and ’60s and a drummer with a light touch and a supple sense of swing. Restricted means, in terms of instrumentation, but the result is a rich experience with no sense of austerity — or of overplaying to fill the spaces.

Trajectories and densities are chosen to make the most of the available resources. The session feels informal and spontaneous, with the rough edges left in. Two of the pieces were composed by Sides and two by Cano, and none of them, ranging from four and a half to six minutes, outstays its welcome. Most of all, it’s good to hear two musicians from different generations and of such diverse backgrounds revelling in the common language.

* Duplexity is available at www.danielcanomusic.bandcamp.com (click on the track “Perpetual Motion” to see a video). Cano and Sides will perform together in a livestream from Ronnie Scott’s Club on April 15: http://www.ronniescotts.co.uk/scheduledaily/2021/April/15. The photograph is by Martin Goodsmith.

Mar 30

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Upper and lower Pharoah

In 1962, when the editors of Down Beat magazine received copies of John Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard, the first recorded evidence of the extended improvisational methods being explored by the saxophonist’s extraordinary quartet in front of jazz-club audiences, they broke from the standard practice by inviting not one but two reviewers to give their judgments. This was a recognition of the significance and the controversial nature of an album whose centrepiece was the track titled “Chasin’ the Trane”, a 16-minute manifesto for the new freedoms. Those editors must have been gratified by the response: one critic welcomed the sense of opening up fresh territory, while the other threw up his arms in horror.

Confronted by the latest recording to feature the distinctive tenor saxophone of Pharoah Sanders, Coltrane’s former colleague, I feel like slipping into both roles. Promises by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra provokes two entirely different responses, perhaps of equal validity.

Floating Points is the name adopted by the DJ and electronic musician Sam Shepherd. The album consists of one Shepherd composition, 47 minutes long, divided into nine movements and created in collaboration with his featured soloist. It is, in effect, a concerto grosso for tenor saxophone, with Sanders drifting and out of the instrumental passages, and also — as has been his wont in the past — adding a brief wordless vocal to one passage.

The LSO’s equal billing is a little misleading. Their resources are used sparingly; nowhere is there the sense of an orchestral tutti, although the brief final movement, which feels like an epilogue, is for the string section alone. Shepherd’s various keyboards — synths, B3, celeste, piano, harpsichord — provide the basic palette, stating a basic seven-note motif that runs, with slight variations, through the first eight movements. If I were to reach for an easy description of the mostly subdued, mostly slow-moving sound he creates, I might say that it resembles like the result of an imaginary collaboration between Nils Frahm and Brian Eno’s generative music app, with the spirits of Terry Riley and Arvo Pärt smiling down on the proceedings. There’s a bit of Necks in there, too, particularly when the B3 takes over in the eighth movement.

And that’s fine, as far as it goes. Perhaps even more than fine. The sounds are carefully chosen and artfully deployed — I’m tempted to say “curated” — in order to fashion something a little more active than ambient music: the colours and densities shift regularly enough to retain the interest. Sanders adds the necessary individual voice, as Wayne Shorter did to Gil Evans’s “The Barbara Song”. Yet his unmistakeable tone arrives almost more like a benediction than as a full participant.

Which is the problem (if there is one, of course). Sanders comes from a musical idiom that emphasises collective interplay and creativity in the moment. There’s none of that here. He plays quite beautifully through the first two movements, filling the spaces between the keyboard leitmotif with finely grained and graded phrases, but even on the fifth and seventh movements, where he stretches out a little, he’s applying his figurations on to an essentially passive undercoat. It couldn’t really be further than the stuff he got up to on Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard Again! in 1966, when the point was to shock the listener into a heightened awareness rather than lull him or her into a beatific trance.

The younger man in me revolts against this. Of course I’m 50-odd years older now, and so is Sanders, who turned 80 last year, and the times are different. But stimulating new settings can be devised for even the freest improvisers of Sanders’s vintage. In 2004 Ashley Wales and John Coxon of Spring Heel Jack invited the saxophonist John Tchicai to respond to a series of electronic pieces and were rewarded with John Tchicai with Strings, a real classic. Alexander Hawkins drew a similar reaction from another distinguished saxophonist, Evan Parker, on the recent Togetherness Music.

On the other hand… Sanders was always looking for different trajectories to transcendence. Tauhid, the first of his recordings for the Impulse label, remains one of my favourite albums of the Sixties, not least for the gentle, blissful “Upper and Lower Egypt”, although it was created in real time with improvisers of the calibre of Sonny Sharrock, Dave Burrell, Henry Grimes, Roger Blank and Nat Bettis, all of whom were rising to meet a challenge. There’s no such challenge in Promises, if challenges are what you’re looking for in music. What is it, then? Is it a lower form of the art? As I discovered at the weekend, it’s perfect Sunday-morning music. And thus I remain divided, content to have bought it because I know I’ll play it again, with enjoyment. But I also know that while it’s on, I’ll be feeling that probably I ought to be listening to something that makes a few more demands.

* Promises is out on the Luaka Bop label.

Mar 28

4 Comments

Hemphill bid’ness

The saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended the same high school at Ornette Coleman, who was eight years his senior and said to be his cousin. By the time he reached his early twenties Hemphill was in St Louis, Missouri, where he joined the Black Artists Group. In 1972 he led a recording session that, when released first on his own small Mbari label and then more widely on Arista Freedom, made a lasting impression on many who heard it. On the initial album, called Dogon A.D., Hemphill seemed to have extended the possibilities of the union between the most basic blues and the avant-garde that was implicit in Coleman’s music.

A second album, which he gave the challenging title Coon Bid’ness, contained a track from that first session, titled “The Hard Blues”, in which Hamiet Bluiett’s baritone saxophone was added to Hemphill’s alto, Baikida Carroll’s trumpet, Abdul Wadud’s cello and Philip Wilson’s drums. It had an even more powerful impact on me. Hemphill seemed to have fused the harsh, elemental sound of John Lee Hooker, the warmth and colour of an Ellington small group and the collective exuberance of a Mingus ensemble into something that pointed a way to the future.

Hemphill moved to New York in the early ’70s and immersed himself in the loft scene. He was a busy man between those first recordings and his death in 1995, perhaps most notably with the World Saxophone Quartet, for which he wrote and arranged many pieces. His own albums ranged from solo saxophone recitals to a full big band. Many of them featured the cello of Wadud, with whom Hemphill had a special rapport: as close a relationship between two instrumentalists as any I can think of in jazz. He had a fondness for exposing the music’s overlooked roots, as when he sometimes adopted the name Roi Boyé, or M’Boyé, as a rubric for his projects, harking back to African kingdoms and southern minstrel shows.

The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony is the title of a new box of seven CDs compiled by one of his acolytes, the saxophonist Marty Erlich, from the contents of the Hemphill archive in the Fails Library at New York University. It’s an extraordinarily rich piece of musical archaeology which covers many aspects of Hemphill’s art at satisfying length.

Most of it is culled from live performance, from the 1978 quartet performance with Olu Dara on trumpet, Wadud and the drummer Warren Smith with which the set begins to a coruscating concert by Hemphill and Carroll with Dave Holland on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums in a Woodstock club in 1979 with which it concludes. Other participants in the various small groups include the brothers Nels and Alex Cline on guitar and drums, John Carter on clarinet, the guitarist Jack Wilkins, the bass guitarist Jerome Harris and the drummer Michael Carvin. One disc features Hemphill playing with the poets K. Curtis Lyle and Malinké Elliott.

Throughout the listener is struck by how effectively Hemphill was able to blend free blowing with structured composition. Some of his themes have the intensity of bebop leavened with the humour of Monk, but with a down-home flavour that was Hemphill’s own. Whether on alto or soprano, he was a stunningly fluent improviser who took off from a space between Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman and headed out into his own territory.

Vigorous and ceaselessly inventive, on alto and soprano he had a marvellously human tone that was most perfectly matched with the sound of Wadud’s cello. What Erlich, in his extensive notes, describes as the “Rosetta stone” of the set is an entire disc of duets recorded in Washington DC in 1989. Somehow Wadud finds a role that combines the functions of bass and guitar while retaining the cello’s own characteristics. He plucks, he bows, he plays double-stops and strums passing chords, while providing a source of energy to match Hemphill’s own. Some of the music is certainly composed, but everything retains the spontaneous urgency of improvisation. On the last of the six pieces, “Downstairs”, which turns out to be a variation on the “Hi-Heel Sneakers”/”Can I Get a Witness” riff, the two men return to the basics they explored on “The Hard Blues” and “Dogon A.D.”.

More unexpected is the inclusion of the arrangements of three Mingus compositions — “Nostalgia in Times Square”, “Alice’s Wonderland” and “Better Git It in Your Soul” — for strings, recorded by the Daedalus String Quartet, Hemphill infusing the ardour characteristic of the composer’s music with an astringency of his own. Recorded at the same Boston concert devoted to Hemphill’s music in 2007 was “Parchment”, a piece for solo piano written for and performed by the pianist Ursula Oppens, his partner in his later years. Two untitled extended pieces for a wind quintet made up of Erlich, the reeds player John Purcell, the bassoonist Janet Grice, the trumpeter Bruce Purse and the trombonist Ray Anderson, recorded in 1981, further demonstrate Hemphill’s interest in classical chamber music and his ability to range between idioms.

Next to the Hemphill/Wadud duets, however, the set’s most valuable disc is the concert with Carroll, Holland and DeJohnette, a decade after the bassist and drummer had first played together, with Miles Davis and then Stan Getz. Throughout three long pieces, Hemphill’s themes trigger ferociously intense playing. The opener, “Mirrors”, contains perhaps the most violent playing I’ve ever heard from DeJohnette, a bold barrage of free creative commentary — particularly under the leader’s long and impassioned improvisation — that culminates in a densely packed solo. Holland emerges in “Dung” with a stunning solo of his own. The final piece, “Would Boogie”, a humorous two-beat exercise in the vein of Mingus’s “My Jelly Roll Soul”, gives DeJohnette an opportunity to take out his melodica, on which he improvises over a noble walking bass.

At $111.93 or £84.99 (see below), this box set isn’t cheap. But its musical and historical value, and the knowledge and care with which it was put together, justify every cent. Julius Hemphill was an important figure in jazz at a time when it was fighting for its identity and its future. His was a voice that reminded us of the enduring potential of the music’s core truths and values, paving the way for the likes of Matana Roberts and Ambrose Akinmusire, and this is a most handsome memorial.

* The photograph of Julius Hemphill was taken by John Begansky Jeffoto in 1980 and is from the booklet accompanying The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony, which is available from New World Records at http://www.newworldrecords.org and from Proper Music in the UK: https://www.propermusic.com/nw80825-the-boye-national-crusade-for-harmony-7cd.html

Mar 19

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ICP in Friesland

Back in the 1970s it was an exquisite shock to hear musicians associated with Instant Composers Pool, the Amsterdam-based collective of free improvisers, playing a dance-band version of “Our Day Will Come”, the old Ruby and the Romantics hit, with no outward signs of irony. It was post-modern, in a way, but it wasn’t arch or condescending. It was just the way they saw things. And that was one of their contributions to the jazz of the last half-century.

Founded in 1967 by the pianist Misha Mengelberg, the saxophonist Willem Breuker and the drummer Han Bennink, ICP is still going strong, despite losing its state funding last year, and its members are still playing dance-band tunes, as you can hear in the clip above, where they perform “De Linkerschoen, de Rechterschoen”, a delightful tune by their bassist, Ernst Glerum, in best palais-glide style. It’s the first of two versions of the tune included in the latest album on their own label: Komen & Gaan by the ICP Septet + Joris Roelofs, Terrie Ex and Mara’s Pianola, which shows the ICP bunch to be as full of irreverent life as ever.

Recorded live at Le Brocope, a jazz and theatre café in Oldeberkoop, a village in Friesland, in north of the Netherlands, it represents an interesting response to the problems presented by the Covid-19 pandemic. To celebrate the venue’s 10th anniversary last October, the musicians were invited to spend a weekend there, eating and drinking and socialising and playing. I don’t know what the lockdown deal was in the Netherlands at the time, but the clip shows the congenial atmosphere they created.

I like this quote in the sleeve note by Mara Eijsbouts, the proprietor of Le Brocope: “As a painting chef, who also happens to be an interior designer, or a designing music lover who loves to cook, a mother of two beautiful daughters, and a historian who likes to write about matters that touch upon the future, entrepreneur, scatterbrain, and hostess in a house with walls that are made of musical energy, and as a jazz lover, I adhere to the adage of jazz: Just play what you like, as long as it fits.”

Throughout the album there are other fragments of the musical history in snatches of “The Sound of Music” and “Ain’t Misbehavin'”, thrown into the mix with the now familiar Dutch mixture of skill and irreverence. But there’s also a lot of free improvisation — sometimes unruly, sometimes exquisite — from the likes of Ab Baars on reeds and shakuhachi, Mary Oliver on violin and viola, Wolter Wierbos on trombone, the pianist Guus Janssen, Michael Moore on alto and clarinet, the great Bennink, the last survivor of the original founding trio, whose inimitable artwork is to be found on the album’s cover, and the two guests, the guitarist Terrie Ex and the bass clarinetist Joris Roelofs.

It’s hard to imagine a more gleefully anarchic piece of music being released in 2021 than the variations on Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor perpetrated on this album by Janssen and Ex. While Janssen fractures and reorganises Bach’s notes at a ridiculous speed, Ex strafes his efforts with skittering bottleneck noise before the two musicians accelerate together into a grandiose finale that includes a few seconds in which they sound as if they’re falling over each other’s feet. Ending with a pratfall thud, it’s a typical piece of ICP surrealism, being simultaneously funny and rather beautiful.

* Komen & Gaan is available, like other ICP albums and publications, from http://www.icporchestra.com

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